Dickey will become TMZ’s managing editor after giving his notice at Variety where he was film editor. Variety’s New York editor Jill Goldsmith was let go on March 8th as was Variety’s creative director Paula Taylor more recently.

This is a huge score for Harvey Levin. Dickey, formerly of TheWrap, is leaving the trade quadrangle for a site that sometimes spends a little bit too much time in the sensational gutter. Hopefully, he can temper that. For example, TMZ.com recently got a lot of flack from the family of a Hollywood nightclub shooting victim for airing full cell phone video footage of the crime.

It’s not clear at this point how involved Dickey will be with the other parts of the Telepictures operation: the nightly syndicated TMZ half-hour and the one-hour TMZ Live daily call-in wrap-up. But our heartiest congrats go out to Dickey and we look forward to watching what the departing trade film editor does at his new place of fast-breaking-news employ.

Finke also confirms in her item something we had heard whispers about: both she and Deadline’s Mike Fleming were asked to contribute to next week’s debut weekly Variety. Did they? We’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out.